Azerbaijan Creates New Class of Elderly Unemployed Teachers

This week, it appears nearly 30,000 teachers are getting the boot for being aged 65 or older. Trend has the story for us:

The retirement of teachers who have reached 65 years of old is discussed in Azerbaijan, Education Minister Misir Mardanov told reporters on Sunday. He said this age limit can be introduced after giving civil servant status to teachers.

Mardanov said that currently there are up to 30,000 teachers aged over 65 years in Azerbaijan.

“The status of civil servants will be given to teachers in stages. Teachers will receive a special status of civil servants. This will be reflected on wages, retirement age,” said Mardanov.

Talk about a dramatic change! Talking with a few of my PCV colleagues who are English teachers, this is hitting some of them pretty hard. One PCV’s counterpart teacher is over 65 and is probably one of the few teachers at the school who is actually trying. Yet, at the same time, a majority of these teachers are ineffective, anyways. They are Soviet holdovers who couldn’t be fired, or were always on time with their bribe payments to keep their jobs.

So while Azerbaijan is creating an entire class of unemployed elderly pensioners, they are also opening up 30,000 new jobs! That sounds good, for a country where unemployment is a serious drag on the economy, especially outside of Baku. Injecting this many new faces into the education system could make a significant change. New teachers, new ideas, a new set of minds to work with and mold to ideas of effective teaching. Yet, again, there are some serious drawbacks here. While all these new teachers will be flowing into schools, there will also likely be new revenue sources coming with them to grease the wheels of corruption. One PCV friend says that, normally, teachers pay up to 2000 AZN for a job at her school. With competition for these jobs likely to be intense, the cost for a job will go up to 3000 AZN. Who knows how big that cost might grow in cities or in Baku?

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Sounds amazing. In a country of 8 million, I would expect there to be maybe 120,000 teachers so 30,000 would represent a good proportion of the total. So, these teachers were not considered civil servants. Strange, if they didn’t have that status before, what on earth were they?

The problem will of course not be filling the posts [although according to the CIA fact-book unemployment in Az. is only 0.8% – the third lowest in the world] but recruiting good teachers. That will be difficult until the government pays them a decent salary…

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